Susan Collins Accuses Gorsuch, Kavanaugh of Reneging on Commitment to Preserve Roe
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Responding to the Monday night leak of a draft majority opinion that, if adopted, would overturn Roe v. Wade, Republican Senator Susan Collins accused Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch of reneging on commitments they allegedly made ahead of their respective confirmations.
The draft Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health opinion, first reported by Politico, upholds Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and overturns the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationally. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito, with Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch concurring.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings,” Collins wrote. “Obviously, we won’t know each Justice’s decision and reasoning until the Supreme Court officially announces its opinion in this case.”
However, Kavanaugh, according to Collin’s own account of their conversation many months prior, did not make a firm pledge to preserve the precedent.
“As the judge asserted to me, a long-established precedent is not something to be trimmed, narrowed, discarded, or overlooked,” Collins told the Washington Post in September. “Its roots in the Constitution give the concept of stare decisis greater weight simply because a judge might want to on a whim. In short, his views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly.”
Collins also claimed to the publication that Kavanaugh told her ” he agreed with what [Chief] Justice [John] Roberts said at his nomination hearing in which he said that it was settled law.” However, Roberts only opined that Roe was a precedent to be respected “like any other precedent of the Court” but that did not necessarily make it immune to new scrutiny and potentially reversal.
In December, Collins announced she would support Democratic efforts to codify the right to abortion into law with the Women’s Health Protection Act. This legislation would have mandated that states allow the abortion of an unborn baby viable outside the womb if a medical provider concludes that it is necessary to a woman’s health. Republican House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy called the bill “radical.”
“Senator Collins supports the right to an abortion and believes that the protections in the Roe and Casey decisions should be passed into law. She has had some conversations with her colleagues about this and is open to further discussions,” a spokeswoman for Collins, Annie Clark, told NBC News in December.
In February, Democrats’ first attempt to enshrine Roe failed when the Senate was unable to invoke cloture and proceed with a vote. The party is unlikely to push it over the finish line so long as the filibuster, the 60-vote hurdle necessary to advance a bill, currently stands in the way. Moderate Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, crucial swing votes in an evenly split chamber, have repeatedly refused to support killing the filibuster to pass abortion legislation.
In 2020, Collins and Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which generally prohibits abortions after 20 weeks of gestation.
